Irony Activity
Beetle Baily comic strip activity. Ironic because the first panel is sarcastic. It is also ironic because one of the characters does not understand what irony is and he thinks that he does (he thinks it refers to ironing an article of clothing).
An Exercise in Sentence Scrambling:
Those Who Don't
Those who don't know any better come into our neighborhood scared. They think we're dangerous. They think we will attack them with shiny knives.
But we aren't afraid.
Yeah.
They are stupid people who are lost and got here by mistake.
But watch us drive into a neighborhood of another color and our knees go shakity-shake and our car windows get rolled up tight and our eyes look straight.
All brown all around, we are safe.
We know the guy with the crooked eye is Davey the Baby's brother, and the fall one next to him in the straw brim, that's Rosa's Eddie V., and the big one that looks like a dumb grown man, he's Fat Boy, though he's not fat anymore nor a boy.
That is how it goes and goes.
- This came from "Those Who Don't" by Sandra Cisneros, a chapter excerpt from The House on Mango Street
I had an idea about this and other activities like this. For middle schoolers, there may be an expectation that the original piece is right and that students are supposed to get as close to the original in order to be right. I think as teachers, we have to be explicit in helping them to understand that they are creating a new work that is also correct. There can easily be misconceptions with this and I think that the teacher needs to be very clear in stating to students, that they are not trying to get at one correct answer. We are simply elaborating and expanding upon the canon as an example of good writing.
Beetle Baily comic strip activity. Ironic because the first panel is sarcastic. It is also ironic because one of the characters does not understand what irony is and he thinks that he does (he thinks it refers to ironing an article of clothing).
An Exercise in Sentence Scrambling:
Those Who Don't
Those who don't know any better come into our neighborhood scared. They think we're dangerous. They think we will attack them with shiny knives.
But we aren't afraid.
Yeah.
They are stupid people who are lost and got here by mistake.
But watch us drive into a neighborhood of another color and our knees go shakity-shake and our car windows get rolled up tight and our eyes look straight.
All brown all around, we are safe.
We know the guy with the crooked eye is Davey the Baby's brother, and the fall one next to him in the straw brim, that's Rosa's Eddie V., and the big one that looks like a dumb grown man, he's Fat Boy, though he's not fat anymore nor a boy.
That is how it goes and goes.
- This came from "Those Who Don't" by Sandra Cisneros, a chapter excerpt from The House on Mango Street
I had an idea about this and other activities like this. For middle schoolers, there may be an expectation that the original piece is right and that students are supposed to get as close to the original in order to be right. I think as teachers, we have to be explicit in helping them to understand that they are creating a new work that is also correct. There can easily be misconceptions with this and I think that the teacher needs to be very clear in stating to students, that they are not trying to get at one correct answer. We are simply elaborating and expanding upon the canon as an example of good writing.